As Downtown LA’s busy skyline of cranes indicates, construction is surging in the neighborhood. Rentcafehas quantified just how many new apartments those cranes have brought.
The rental data site analyzed PropertyShark and Yardi Matrix construction data in about 1,000 U.S. neighborhoods, looking at “large-scale rental buildings of 50 or more units located in the largest 30 cities in the U.S.” It found that from 2010 to 2016, 7,551 new units in 35 new residential buildings were built in DTLA.
In that six-year period, these new additions accounted for 63 percent of all available rentals in Downtown, says Rentcafe.
Downtown ranked second among big-city neighborhoods that added the most new units. Long Island City in New York added 12,533 units over the same period of time.
Separate reports looking at the city as a whole have found that while LA is on track to add a record number of units this year, it’s still far less than the number of units that were put on the market in the 1980s.
Though the number of units being brought to market is relatively high according to Rentcafe’s findings, experts have indicated that the units probably aren’t coming online fast enough to create a sizeable dip in LA’s rental prices, which are rising more rapidly than the rents in the rest of the state.
Also, the wave of development may be hitting a wall: An analysis of building permits showed a 6 percent drop in the total number of permits issued in 2015 and the total number of those issued in 2016. That drop is notable as it’s the first such decrease in six years. It remains to be seen whether the decline is the start of a larger trend.
[Ref: la.curbed.com]
